My one real rose began life in one of those 4-inch pots, a gift from a visitor who came to do a Fiddle Tunes workshop. I stuck it in a planter box on the ground and neglected it. I didn’t take it seriously.
But last year transplanted into a good-sized pot and and crowded with a stargazer lily, the rose flowered until December. The stargazer bloomed and perfumed last summer and has two budded stalks now. Buds formed early on the rose and shapely pink blossoms followed. Of course I wish for more.
In one of her newspaper columns, published June 25, 1954, Vita Sackville-West wrote:
“Dead-heading the roses on a summer evening is an occupation to carry us back to a calmer age and a different century. Queen Victoria might still be on the throne. All is quiet in the garden; the paths are pale; our silent satellite steals up in the sky; even the aeroplanes have gone to roost and our own nerves have ceased to twangle. There is no sound except the rhythmic snip-snip of our own secateurs, cutting the dead-heads off, back to a new bud, to provoke new growth for the immediate future.”
her spirits rose... 
I never really took to roses until this summer in Portland when I cut bouquets from the few rose bushes in our yard (and once in awhile from our neighbor’s bushes neglected next to our driveway) and lived with the flowers indoors. Our white and sometimes blush pink roses made an elegant picture in a vase from the thrift store down the street, or in a regular jar on a table next to our living room’s red walls. In a way roses are like thoughts – not much when waving in the wind, but when thoughtfully picked and gathered they can make a terrific statement.
It’s such fun for me that you are revisiting these old posts and finding things to comment on. I find myself often challenged to remember what I was writing about a certain subject – like roses? I get to reread. Thank you for attending to these!
Oh and what a treat to reread Vita! I miss those days of being engrossed in all that wonderful garden writing – and she was one of the best – so full of knowledge and so poetic.